Poverty Advocacy Group Blast SA Premier’s Participation In CEO Sleepout
“The CEO sleepout is just a bunch of billionaires LARPing poverty.”
Criticism is being heaped on South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas over his participation in St Vincent de Paul’s CEO Sleepout.
The Premier’s participation in the sleepout — which encourages prominent business figures and public politicians alike to sleep without shelter to raise funds for the St Vincent De Paul foundation — is being critiqued by poverty advocacy groups and others with lived experience of homelessness amid a public housing crisis in the state.
A spokesperson from the Anti-Poverty Centre Kristin O’Connell told Junkee that the Premier’s involvement in the sleepout was especially galling considering the recent SA budget which advocates have criticised for doing little to address the rising cost of living.
“The Premier is in a position to build a public home for everybody who needs one in South Australia,” Kristin O’Connell told Junkee.
O’Connell told Junkee that the announcement of 400 new public housing homes made by the Premier last month “wouldn’t make much of a dent” while over 17,000 people are currently on waiting lists for public housing in South Australia.
“I think it’s disrespectful to people who actually have to deal with this day in day out with no real prospect that powerful people – and particularly the premier – are ever going to do anything that will help improve their circumstances,” O’Connell told Junkee.
In his own preparations for the sleepout, State Premier for South Australia Peter Malinauskas posted a photo to Twitter yesterday rugged up in a sleeping bag underneath a tarp.
I’m heading out to participate in the @VinniesSA @CEOSleepout this week.
It’s for an important and worthy cause. pic.twitter.com/wrVscVzvy6
— Peter Malinauskas (@PMalinauskasMP) June 19, 2022
While many praised Malinauskas’s participation in the sleepout which generates millions for St Vincent annually (including during 2020, when due to Covid-19 restrictions CEOs were allowed to sleep in their backyards or couches), others have blasted the practice, likening it to poverty cosplaying.
The CEO sleepout is just a bunch of billionaires LARPing poverty
— Mo Quirk ?️⚧️ they/them (@moaquirk) June 20, 2022
I’m offended deeply by the grotesque cosplay of the CEO sleepout. It trivialises my experiences of homelessness, and that of others. Homelessness isn’t a performance, it has lasting & sometimes deadly consequences. I’ve grown up, but I’ll never overcome the trauma of homelessness https://t.co/ZuLH7QFn4V
— Dr Liz Allen (@DrDemography) June 20, 2022
A spokesperson from St Vincent de Paul told Junkee that the sleepout aims to educate key stakeholders while raising money for society. “The Society welcomes the commitment of any government representative or business or community leader to hear the stories of the real-life impacts of homelessness and poverty and to actively do more about the issue,” they told Junkee.
“Leaders from a wide variety of organisations, government and community groups who support the event hear directly from people with lived experience and learn more about this complex issue first-hand. They are also called to advocate on the issue beyond the event to help bring about change.”
Kristin O’Connell says that despite the aims of the sleepout, the juxtaposition of people from wealth and power performing homelessness is “grotesque”.
“Let’s be clear, they’re not sleeping rough, they’re camping. This is a leisure activity that I’m sure many of them engage in for fun. The reality is when talking about poverty and homelessness, one of the worst aspects of it is the sense you do not know how you will escape it,” O’Connell told Junkee.
“There is no length of time that you can pretend or perform poverty and homelessness that can give you that sense of despair if you know that you have a secure home somewhere waiting for you.”
Junkee has reached out to Premier Peter Malinauskas for comment.